Folderol loiters on the fringes of language

By Jim Willard

Posted:
09/08/2013 01:00:00 AM MDT

I could swear I heard a character in a recent play the CEO and I attended use the expression, but then I don't always hear things clearly any more (or perhaps it's "selective hearing" as the CEO says). The character said something about a lot of "folderol."

The setting was in the 1930s so it's likely I heard correctly; I heard the word used more frequently a few decades ago.

Folderol or falderal has come to mean "empty talk" or "nonsense" through the years since before Shakespeare's time.

The term first appeared as a refrain in Scottish songs more than three centuries ago, usually as an ending to silly little songs. So, it became employed for a flimsy trifle or a little empty nothing.

Of the many traditional rhymes and songs, these are good examples. Robert Bell recorded these words from an old Yorkshire mummer's play in his "Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry Of England" of 1857: "I hope you'll prove kind with your money and beer,/ We shall come no more near you until the next year./ Fal de ral, lal de lal, etc." Early in 1819, Sir Walter Scott threw in a few lines of a Scottish ballad in his "The Bride of Lammermoor": "There was haggis in Dunbar,/ Fal de ral, etc."

Around that time this traditional chorus was first recorded as a term for a gewgaw or a flimsy thing that was flashy but of little value.

In the 1870s, the term became widely used and it loiters on the fringes of the language of today's seniors.

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Jim Willard, a Loveland resident since 1967, retired from Hewlett-Packard after 33 years to focus on less trivial things. He calls Twoey, his bichon frisé-Maltese dog, vice president of research for his column.